An artist's impression of Australia 108, Melbourne, with the Eureka Tower to its right. Photograph: Australia 108

The first thing I thought when I saw the artist's impression of the planned Australia 108 skyscraper for Melbourne’s Southbank district was that it reminded me of a Dyson vacuum cleaner. Perhaps it’s the contorted angular form, or the metallic purple spire and detailing. Whatever it is, I wondered whether, like our Dyson DC59 Animal, Australia 108 comes with two-tier radial cyclone technology. Or is its ugliness simply a monument to putting too much trust in computer aided design?

Architect Nonda Katsalidis (of Fender Katsalidis) has had to rejig the design, bringing it down a peg or two, to allow planes to make an emergency landing at Essendon without whacking into somebody’s lurid purple balcony.

It is tempting to point the finger at Aspial chief executive Koh Wee Seng. He has been quoted saying he wants his erection to stand among the world’s most iconic. However, somebody should have told Koh that it’s not how big it is, it’s how you use it. And setting out to create an icon never really works out; just look towards James Packer with his Barangaroo casino. Aspial hopes to create a mixed-use development, incorporating apartments, a hotel, and some retail. However this is currently being reviewed.

“What’s the point of yet another tower claiming it is higher than the rest?” he says. “The simple fact is that we really do not need buildings more than 10-storeys high, and pushing them up over 300 metres is extremely energy inefficient, highly expensive to maintain, and inconvenient for the people who live in the buildings.”

As for the design, Drew is less than impressed: “It’s a tortured shape, pretending to be a meaningful sculpture,” he says. “Whereas something such as the Willis Tower in Chicago is actually a rational design, this is just junk crying out to be labelled as an icon. It will be Melbourne’s tallest residential building, until some other godawful thing supplants it.”

Philip Goad, professor of architecture at the University of Melbourne, believes Australia 108 will make Melbourne’s Southbank almost an equal partner in the visual weight of the city’s overall skyline.

“This has been happening over the last decade where south of the Yarra has now become an almost high-rise residential suburb of Melbourne,” says Goad. “Southbank is rapidly becoming Melbourne’s Manhattan.”

And he believes that Southbank is a city of 21st century where the vertical has precedence over the horizontal. “That part of Southbank is physically bound by freeways and overpasses, so it is a contained little knot that’s very, very tall. It’s not necessarily my idea of place to live but to many people it will be just across the river from the city proper.”

And what does he think of the tower itself? “Well, Nonda Katsalidis's interests are sculptural and so the building is meant to read like a piece of constructivist sculpture,” he says.

“I think tall buildings in Australia talk about aspirations for personal legacy at the level of the skyline, and that’s not unusual. It’s interesting thought that once skyscrapers were symbols of corporations. Now they’re no longer that because of the complexity of tenancies. They have become visual landmarks rather than bearers of meaning. It’s no surprise then that the architects these days are treating them like sculptural totems.”